Fernando Pessoa

Quotations

- The poet is a faker

Who's so good at his act

He even fakes the pain

Of pain he feels in fact.

- I am nothing.

I will never be anything.

I cannot wish to be anything.

Bar that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.

- Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

- My nation is the Portuguese language.

- I've always rejected being understood.

To be understood is to prostitute oneself.

I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.

- I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.

- My past is everything I failed to be.

- We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.

- To have opinions is to sell out to yourself.

To have no opinions is to exist.

To have every opinion is to be a poet.

- I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else.

What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.

- But I am not perfect in my way of putting things. Because I lack the divine simplicity of being only what I appear to be.

- In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago.

And many of the seem to me written by a stranger:

I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

- There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women.

There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality.

There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows…

I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

- To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)

- To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

- Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them.

In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.

- In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.

- Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.

- There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn't exist.

- I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

- I'd like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls.

- Rocks in my path? I keep them all. With them I shall build my castle.

- Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.

- Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.

Fernando Pessoa

(June 13, 1888, Lisbon – November 30, 1935, Lisbon),

Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.

José Saramago

Quotations

• Divorcing Shua is no problem, the problem is how to divorce myself, and that's impossible.

• People don't choose their dreams, dreams choose people!

• Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.

• Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.

• News is nothing but words, and you can never really tell if words are news.

• Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in one’s eyes.

• I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always clichés, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

• Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

• I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up.

• Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.

• ...sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another...

• People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.

• Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

• The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.

• What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

José Saramago
(16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) 

José de Sousa Saramago was a Nobel-laureate (1998) Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright and journalist. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor.

More than two million copies of his books have been sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages. He founded the National Front for the Defence of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with Freitas-Magalhães and others. In 1992, the Portuguese government, under Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva, ordered the removal of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from the European Literary Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was religiously offensive. Saramago complained about censorship and moved to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain, where he resided until his death.

A proponent of libertarian communism, Saramago came into conflict with some groups, such as the Catholic Church. Saramago was an atheist who defended love as an instrument to improve the human condition.

The Magician

The Magic of Humanity

The stories that you write, the pictures that you paint, the music you compose,

the crazy, foolish and incomprehensible things you say,

they’ll always be man’s apogee, his true flag […]

these stupid things you say—no matter how supremely unnecessary, perhaps even because of it —

will always be what most distinguishes us from beasts.

Even more than the atom, Sputnik, or interstellar rockets.

And the day these stupid things are no longer done or said,

men will become the wretched naked worms they were in caveman days.”

“Il colombre e altri cinquanta racconti”

Dino Buzzati

Dino Buzzati-Traverso (16 October 1906 - 28 January 1972) was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera.

His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel Il deserto dei Tartari, translated into English as The Tartar Steppe.

The difference between Love and lust

Love according to Shakespeare

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,

But Lust's effect is tempest after sun;

Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,

Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done.

Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;

Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.

Venus and Adonis
William Shakespeare

Jerome David Salinger, quotes

The Catcher in the Rye
Quotes

I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera.


Where I lived at Pencey, I lived in the Ossenburger Memorial Wing of the new dorms. It was only for juniors and seniors. I was a junior. My roommate was a senior. It was named after this guy Ossenburger that went to Pencey. He made a pot of dough in the undertaking business after he got out of Pencey. What he did, he started these undertaking parlors all over the country that you could get members of your family buried for about five bucks apiece. You should see old Ossenburger. He probably just shoves them in a sack and dumps them in the river. Anyway, he gave Pencey a pile of dough, and they named our wing alter him.


The first football game of the year, he came up to school in this big goddamn Cadillac, and we all had to stand up in the grandstand and give him a locomotive-that's a cheer. Then, the next morning, in chapel, he made a speech that lasted about ten hours. He started off with about fifty corny jokes, just to show us what a regular guy he was. Very big deal. Then he started telling us how he was never ashamed, when he was in some kind of trouble or something, to get right down his knees and pray to God. He told us we should always pray to God-talk to Him and all-wherever we were. He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I just see the big phoney bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs.


What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while. I read a lot of classical books…, and I like them, and I read a lot of war books and mysteries and all, but they don't knock me out too much. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. I wouldn't mind calling this Isak Dinesen up. And Ring Lardner, except that D.B. told me he's dead.

Jerome David Salinger

(January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010)

He was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980.

Raised in Manhattan, Salinger began writing short stories while in secondary school, and published several stories in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. Salinger published his first stories in Story magazine which was started by Whit Burnett. In 1948 he published the critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his subsequent work. In 1951 Salinger released his novel The Catcher in the Rye, an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel remains widely read and controversial, selling around 250,000 copies a year.

The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny: Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953), a volume containing a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled "Hapworth 16, 1924", appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.

Afterward, Salinger struggled with unwanted attention, including a legal battle in the 1980s with biographer Ian Hamilton and the release in the late 1990s of memoirs written by two people close to him: Joyce Maynard, an ex-lover; and Margaret Salinger, his daughter. In 1996, a small publisher announced a deal with Salinger to publish "Hapworth 16, 1924" in book form, but amid the ensuing publicity, the release was indefinitely delayed. He made headlines around the globe in June 2009, after filing a lawsuit against another writer for copyright infringement resulting from that writer's use of one of Salinger's characters from The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.

Emile M. Cioran

Emile M. Cioran Quotes

There are eyes which can no longer learn anything from the sun, and souls afflicted by nights from which they will never recover.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter!

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

You will suffer from everything, and to excess:

the winds will seem gales; every touch a dagger; smiles, slaps; trifles, cataclysms.

Waking may come to an end, but its light survives within you; one does not see in the dark with impunity,

one does not gather its lessons without danger;

there are eyes which can no longer learn anything from the sun, and souls afflicted by nights from which they will never recover.

There are eyes which can no longer learn anything from the sun, and souls afflicted by nights from which they will never recover.

Emil Cioran

Emil Cioran (April 8, 1911 – June 20, 1995) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist.

Emil Cioran was born in Răşinari, Sibiu County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time. His father, Emilian Cioran, was a Romanian Orthodox priest, while his mother, Elvira Cioran (born Comaniciu), was originally from Veneţia de Jos, a commune near Făgăraş.

After studying humanities at the Gheorghe Lazăr High School in Sibiu (Hermannstadt), Cioran, aged 17, started to study philosophy at the University of Bucharest. Upon his entrance into the University, he met Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade, the three of them becoming lifelong friends. Future Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica and future Romanian thinker Petre Ţuţea, became his closest colleagues for they all had Tudor Vianu and Nae Ionescu as their professors. Cioran, Eliade, and Ţuţea became supporters of the ideas that their philosophy professor, Nae Ionescu, had become a fervent advocate of a tendency deemed Trăirism, which fused Existentialism with ideas common in various forms of Fascism.

Cioran had a good command of German. His first studies revolved around Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and especially Friedrich Nietzsche. He became an agnostic, taking as an axiom "the inconvenience of existence". During his studies at the University he was also influenced by the works of Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages and Martin Heidegger, but also by the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, who added the belief that life is arbitrary to Cioran’s central system of thought. He then graduated with a thesis on Henri Bergson (however, Cioran later rejected Bergson, claiming the latter did not comprehend the tragedy of life).

In 1933, he obtained a scholarship to the University of Berlin, where he came into contact with Klages and Nicolai Hartmann. While in Berlin, he became interested in measures taken by the Nazi regime, contributed a column to Vremea dealing with the topic (in which Cioran confessed that "there is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable than Hitler", while expressing his approval for the Night of the Long Knives — "what has humanity lost if the lives of a few imbeciles were taken"), and, in a letter written to Petru Comarnescu, described himself as "a Hitlerist". He held similar views about Italian fascism, welcoming victories in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, arguing that: "Fascism is a shock, without which Italy is a compromise comparable to today's Romania".

Cioran’s first book, On the Heights of Despair (more accurately translated: "On the Summits of Despair"), was published in Romania in 1934. It was awarded the Commission’s Prize and the Young Writers Prize for one of the best books written by an unpublished young writer. Successively, The Book of Delusions (1935), The Transfiguration of Romania (1936), and Tears and Saints (1937), were also published in Romania.

Although Cioran was never a member of the group, it was during this time in Romania that he began taking an interest in the ideas put forth by the Iron Guard - a far right organization whose nationalist ideology he supported until the early years of World War II, despite allegedly disapproving of their violent methods.

Cioran revised The Transfiguration of Romania heavily in its second edition released in the 1990s, eliminating numerous passages he considered extremist or "pretentious and stupid." In its original form, the book expressed sympathy for totalitarianism, a view which was also present in various articles Cioran wrote at the time, and which aimed to establish "urbanization and industrialization" as "the two obsessions of a rising people". Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania, published in English in 2005, gives an in-depth analysis of The Transfiguration.

His early call for modernization was, however, hard to reconcile with the traditionalism of the Iron Guard. In 1934, he wrote: "I find that in Romania the sole fertile, creative, and invigorating nationalism can only be one which does not just dismiss tradition, but also denies and defeats it". Disapproval of what he viewed as specifically Romanian traits had been present in his works ("In any maxim, in any proverb, in any reflection, our people expresses the same shyness in front of life, the same hesitation and resignation... [...] Everyday Romanian [truisms] are dumbfounding."), which led to criticism from the far right Gândirea (its editor, Nichifor Crainic, had called The Transfiguration of Romania "a bloody, merciless, massacre of today's Romania, without even [the fear] of matricide and sacrilege"), as well as from various Iron Guard papers.

After coming back from Berlin (1936), Cioran taught philosophy at the "Andrei Şaguna" high school in Braşov for a year. In 1937, he left for Paris with a scholarship from the French Institute of Bucharest, which was then prolonged until 1944. After a short stay in his home country (November 1940-February 1941), Cioran never returned again.

He later renounced not only his support for the Iron Guard, but also their nationalist ideas, and frequently expressed regret and repentance for his emotional implication in it. For example, in a 1972 interview, he condemned it as "a complex of movements; more than this, a demented sect and a party", and avowed: "I found out then [...] what it means to be carried by the wave without the faintest trace of conviction. [...] I am now immune to it".

In 1940, he started writing The Passionate Handbook, and finished it by 1945. It was to be the last book that he would write in Romanian, although not the last to deal with pessimism and misanthropy through delicate and lyrical aphorisms. From this point on Cioran only published books in French (all were appreciated not only because of their content, but also because of their style which was full of lyricism and fine use of the language).

In 1949 his first French book, A Short History of Decay, was published by Gallimard and was awarded the Rivarol Prize in 1950. Later on, Cioran refused every literary prize with which he was presented.

The Latin Quarter of Paris became Cioran’s permanent residence. He lived most of his life in isolation, avoiding the public. Yet, he still maintained numerous friends with which he conversed often such as Mircea Eliade, Eugène Ionesco, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, and Henri Michaux.

He is buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery.

Literature and human destiny

In praise of reading and fiction

Literature is a false representation of life that nevertheless helps us to understand life better,
to orient ourselves in the labyrinth where we are born, pass by, and die.
It compensates for the reverses and frustrations real life inflicts on us,
and because of it we can decipher, at least partially,
the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings,
principally those of us who generate more doubts than certainties and confess our perplexity before subjects like
transcendence, individual and collective destiny,
the soul, the sense or senselessness of history, the to and fro of rational knowledge.

Mario Vargas Llosa

In praise of reading and fiction

Nobel Lecture

December 7, 2010

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Laughter

Laughter

Philip Roth: In your last book, though, something else is involved. In a little parable you compare the laughter of angels with the laughter of the devil.

The devil laughs because God's world seems senseless to him; the angels laugh with joy because everything in God's world has its meaning. 


Milan Kundera: Yes, man uses the same physiologic manifestations- laughter- to express two different metaphysical attitudes.

Someone's hat drops on a coffin in a freshly dug grave, the funeral loses its meaning and laughter is born.

Two lovers race through the meadow, holding hands, laughing. Their laughter has nothing to do with jokes or humor, it is the serious laughter of angels expressing their joy of being.

Both kinds of laughter belong among life's pleasures, but when it also denotes a dual apocalypse:

the enthusiastic laughter of angel-fanatics, who are so convinced of their world's significance that they are ready to hang anyone not sharing their joy.

And the other laughter, sounding from the opposite side, which proclaims that everything has become meaningless, that even funerals are ridiculous and group sex a mere comical pantomime.

Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.

The Most Original Book of the Season

Philip Roth interviews Milan Kundera (30/11/1980)

People identity

People identity

Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry,
their passions a quotation.

De Profundis

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer, poet, and prominent aesthete; who, after writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the tragedy of his imprisonment and early death.

Education

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire

W.B.Yeats

(13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939)

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. Over the years, Yeats adopted many different ideological positions, including, in the words of the critic Michael Valdez Moses, "those of [the] radical nationalist, classical liberal, reactionary
conservative and millenarian
nihilist".

Between friendship and solitude

Between solitude and friendship

It will never be my view that solitude is disturbed by the presence of a friend,

but that it is enriched.

If I had the choice of doing without one or the other,

I should prefer to be deprived of solitude rather than of my friend.

On the solitary life

Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca
(July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374)

Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest Renaissance humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism". In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern Italian language based on Petrarch's works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio and, especially, Dante Alighieri. This would be later endorsed by the Accademia della Crusca. His sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry. Petrarch was also known for being one of the first people to refer to the Dark Ages.

Simplicity

Simplicity

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Nothing is better than simplicity—nothing can make up for excess, or for the lack of definiteness.

Leaves of Grass (Preface)

Walt Whitman

Friendship

Friendship

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance;

they make the latitudes and longitudes.

Henry David Thoreau

The rain

The nature of the rain

"The nature of rain is the same,

but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens."

Arabic Proverb

Profit

Profit

What's the earthly use of putting a man on the moon

when we cannot live on the earth?

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Life is...

Someone said:

"Life is something that happens to us

while we're busy making other plans."

John Lennon